Michelle's fingers hovered over my chest.

"Don't touch," I said, my muscles tensing in anticipation.

She dipped her hand into the bath water, letting her fingers float over my stomach, and further down. When I first met Michelle about ten years ago, back in high school, she seemed just like any teenager from these parts. But she had a rebellious streak that touched me, perhaps because it reminded me of my mother. In turn, she told me that she was drawn to my laughter, to my eyes that crinkled up like my father's.

I looked warily at her fingers. The very thought of her hand on my skin made me ache with longing — and anticipated pain. "Don't even think about it."

"You can't go on like this." She sat on the edge of the bathtub, her eyes trailing up and down my body.

"It'll get better." I sank further into the tepid water.

"It's not getting better. You look awful."

"There's a new cream I haven't tried yet."

She shook her head. "It's not going to work. They're just throwing everything at you, hoping something will do the trick." Her finger plowed figures of eight in the water, just above my belly button. "You'll just have to do what the doctor says," she said, watching her finger go round and round, like a toy car on a toy track.

A strand of dark hair fell across her cheek, and she inclined her head so I couldn't see what her eyes held.

"The doctor told you to do what?" Auntie Mary looked up from the boab nut she was carving, the tip of her knife suspended in the air. "He really thinks you should leave?" She bent back over her work, plowing the carving knife through the hard surface of the seedpod, chiseling a path that would turn into a snake, or a frog, or perhaps a sea turtle. Auntie Mary's workshop took up the whole front room of the tin-roofed cottage she lived in. The only place to sit was around the perimeter of the room, on the floor, since all other surfaces were covered with materials she needed for her craft.

Auntie Mary wasn't really my aunt. And although she carved Aboriginal motifs into boab nuts and painted them onto emu eggs, she wasn't Aboriginal, either. No one knew for sure who Auntie Mary was married to, because she referred to all the men she had lived with as her husbands. Her brief dalliance with my grandfather entitled her to consider herself my "auntie," a title she never relinquished once she laid claim to it. She was one of the most prolific aunties in Broome.

"Either that, or I can turn nocturnal. Sleep during the day. Get up at night."

"And do what?"

"I don't know." I didn't want to live at night, not on my own. But I didn't want to leave, either.

"Living upside down no good for your blood," she said. "You could turn into a ghost."

I thought about how it would be to live in the dark, never to be blinded by the sun reflecting off the ripples in the water, never to watch the colors of the ocean change through the day. And never to see Michelle throw back her head and turn her face to the sun.

"You still going with Michelle." Auntie Mary said it as a statement.

"Of course."

"I don't want you giving her bad blood. Wouldn't be natural." Auntie Mary was Michelle's "auntie" as well.

"So you're saying I should leave." I meant it as a question, hoping she would tell me to stay, that she'd say she knew of a cure.

Auntie Mary blew dust from her chiseling knife. "Where you off to, then?"

I had an answer, just in case. "Melbourne, I guess." Melbourne in winter, where the sun was distant, veiled by layers of mist and cloud like a forbidding goddess, and the skies were low with rain. The kind of weather my skin needed.

"What you gonna do there?"

"I was thinking of getting work with Mick Bryant. You know, the bloke who left for Melbourne a couple of years ago. Michelle said he's running a night club there. Maybe he can use an extra pair of hands."

Auntie Mary nodded and went back to carving her boab nut.